‘Ireland is a wealthy country but in tennis terms,we are a third-world nation’
There is more to our failure to produce elite-level players than lack of facilities and climate
THE first tennis Grand Slam of the year concludes this weekend. More than 40 nations were represented at Melbourne Park over the last fortnight, but Ireland was once again conspicuous by its absence.
Since the sport entered its professional era in the 1960s, only eight Irish players – six men and two women – have made it into the main draw of a Grand Slam. Just one has ever won a match – Louk Sorensen at the 2010 Australian Open.
This weekend, however, will be significant for tennis here as Ireland play Austria in the World Group I play-offs at the UL Arena, it will be the first Davis Cup match in this country for nine years. Tickets for the two days of action sold out in record time, with the prospect of former US Open champion Dominic Thiem being on the Austrian team. But it also shows the appetite for top-level tennis here.
Conor Niland is captain of the Davis Cup team and one of those eight players to have reached the main draw of a Grand Slam, having done so twice in 2011, the season when he also reached a career-high world ranking of 127. In July of that year, the watching Irish public were gripped as he went a double-break up in the fifth and deciding set against Adrian Mannarino at the All-England club – with the legendary Roger Federer (whom Niland had beaten as a junior) waiting in the second round. But, agonisingly, he let the opportunity slip. However, the Limerick native maintained his good form by reaching the US Open later the same year.
Niland got the plum draw at Flushing Meadows, meeting world number one Novak Djokovic on the Arthur Ashe court, but had to retire ill midway through the first set. Sorensen followed him on the court, but injury caused him to also withdraw. Nonetheless, two Irish players at one Grand Slam was remarkable (Andy Murray was the sole British representative at the same tournament). More than a decade later, it looks extraordinary. James McGee reached the final qualifying round of the US Open in 2014, only to lose in a deciding set. Since then, there has been nothing.
‘You would have hoped when myself and Louk broke through that it would be the start of something, but it wasn’t unfortunately. What I would say is that the problem is not unique to Ireland, there are countries with far more sophisticated tennis systems that find it tough to produce top players. The UK, for years, had difficulty. That changed with Murray obviously, but it had been an issue for years,’ Niland says.
Which is why next weekend is so important. It will give the likes of Simon Carr and Osgar O’Hoisin, in the lower 700s of the ATP rankings, a taste of playing Thiem or Sebastian Ofner, currently 37 in the world.
‘We have been waiting a long time to have a game like this. It is going to be a challenge for our guys, playing a Grand Slam winner and someone ranked in the 30s, but this is the test we want for our players,’ Niland points out.
But the eternal question about Irish tennis remains. Why can’t the sport, which has 186 clubs and 80,000 members across the island, produce an elite-level player?
History tells us that Ireland used to make its imprint on the tennis world – in the 1890s and 1900s, Irish players were winning Wimbledon titles while in the 1950s and 1960s, the Irish Open was one of the most prestigious events on tour, with the great Rod Laver a regular visitor.
In 1983, a Davis Cup team led by Matt Doyle even hosted the United States, with John McEnroe starring, in the RDS. McEnroe has always been proud of his Irish ancestry and played it up that week. In one RTÉ interview, he highlighted a major issue in Irish tennis when drawing a parallel with his hometown of Douglaston in the state of New York.
‘We have more indoor courts in my hometown than you do in the whole of this country and my town is a small place,’ McEnroe observed. ‘With the weather you guys get here, you need more indoor courts.’
Forty years later, that remains an issue. There’s the odd indoor court dotted around the country – in Dublin and Belfast, Castlebar and Galway, but there is not a single facility in all of Munster.
‘If you had a talented kid, say 11 or 12, from Cork or Waterford, you need to travel to Dublin or Galway to get them coaching. So, that’s travel costs to and from, and the cost of renting these courts, which could be upwards of €200 or €250 a week, which could be €900 a month. That’s a second mortgage!’ suggests Garry Cahill, a former Davis Cup captain who spent more than a decade as technical director of Tennis Ireland before stepping away to set up Prodigy Academy in 2019.
He feels the shortage of adequate facilities and infrastructure to develop young talent is a problem.
‘Ireland is a wealthy country but in tennis terms, we are a third-world nation. The sport has never had that injection of funding that is necessary to go out and produce players. And it needs to be done at a young age.
‘The way that High Performance sport is viewed in Ireland means athletes are funded and carded when they get up to Olympic and European medal winning standard, but that is too late in tennis. Players need to be funded at a much earlier age.’
Cahill has used his experience in the sport, and the case study of tennis and Ireland, to obtain a PhD in human performance at DCU. It is not solely an Irish problem as a comparative study with Malaysia proved.
‘Malaysia is an interesting case, they are producing top squash and badminton players but no tennis players, and they are far better resourced than here, their tennis centre is second to none and they aren’t even producing a top junior player,’ he says.
‘I think Ireland needs to look at the system that works best for them. It is not a case of seeing what worked in other countries and transplanting it here, as has been tried in the past, or just copying superpowers like France or Spain.
Clay courts teach you patience – how to pick the right shot
‘We need a strategic plan that takes into account the unique factors here in Ireland, the fact we have GAA, the school system here and yes, the weather, and come up with a system that is best for developing young talent here.
‘It will take someone thinking outside the box, but it can be done. Look what boxing has done over the past 20 years, and that came from someone thinking what worked best for the type of athlete here in Ireland. You are always hopeful it can happen here but unless a generational talent comes along, it is going to take some radical thinking.’
There are a lot of problems to solve. Our climate. The lack of facilities. The lack of clay courts. Over 90 per cent of courts in this country are artificial grass, perfect for our
consistent wet and windy weather, but not too good for nurturing young talent, because the surface is too fast.
‘Clay courts are key for developing players,’ Niland says. ‘The pace is slower, the rallies last longer, the ball bounces higher.
‘It teaches you patience on the court, how to pick the right shot. If players at 16 or 17 are coming from 10 years of playing on clay, they will be much further down the road in development than our players.
‘They talk about our weather, but other countries in northern Europe with similar climate, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, are able to have them. We have artificial clay in Fitzwilliam now and our biggest event is played on it every August, and there are others down in Tipperary, but there aren’t enough.’
Dave Miley is a Dubliner who worked with the International Tennis Federation for 25 years and is now national director of Kazakhstan, so he has a decent perspective on what is not being done or should be done in Ireland.
‘We have heard the excuse of the weather, but other countries have those challenges and worse. The weather gets pretty bad here in Kazakhstan, down to minus 20 last week, but you work around it. You need to start looking at the glass half full rather than half empty. Ireland is a small country, so that should become an advantage when looking to organise junior competition,’ Miley explains.
‘Going back to the 1980s, when we had Matt Doyle and Sean Sorensen, Ireland was at the same level as Portugal, Poland and the Netherlands,
but they have all progressed and produced top players. We haven’t. And you can fire the excuses of the climate and facilities, but there was a lack of planning too.
‘I will say that the current board of Tennis Ireland and the CEO (Kevin Quinn) are very good and they have some great ideas. They are all former players, but they are playing catch-up.’
Kazakhstan, despite their disadvantages, had a handful of junior players competing in Australia, the product of long-term thinking and strategic planning.
‘I call it planification. You have to take all the ingredients, and education is part of it for a young tennis player, and it is just about planning really well in advance, so they can travel to these tournaments. In Ireland, a young person might have 17 or 18 weeks off school in the year, so you just have to be a little bit organised.’
But even if the top young players are getting the right volume of tennis and enough competition at 12 or 13, there will still come a time when they will need to go away – Andy Murray left Scotland for 18 months of a finishing school in Barcelona, and Jenny Claffey, who spent a year at an academy in Valencia when she was a transition year student, wonders if Irish parents have the desire to send kids away.
‘Why aren’t we producing a top player is something I’ve thought a lot about,’ says Claffey, ‘everyone in Irish tennis has and there are a myriad of reasons, lack of clay courts and the predominance of artificial grass, the depth of competition is not here in Ireland, and I just think we are more into team sports – I played rugby sevens and football – and I just think we are more into that. And those other sports tend to be better-organised.
‘And if you are an exceptional junior tennis player in Ireland, you probably need to go away to Spain or France at 12 to get the right coaching and take your game to the next level. I don’t know if there are many Irish people willing to send their kids away at 12.’
‘I went to a tennis academy in Valenica, I took fourth year out of school. I had just turned 15, and it was a shock to the system. It opened my eyes. I was going from being the top junior player in Ireland to just a very small fish in a very big pond. ‘
Claffey’s initial plan to turn professional as a teenager was curtailed by a shoulder problem. When she did eventually go pro in her early 20s, she shot up the rankings, reaching the top 600s before an elbow injury put paid to her dreams. And injuries – part and parcel of the brutal life on the circuit – seem to intrude on Irish aspirations more than most.
Georgia Drummy, who showed such promise as a junior in reaching three Grand Slams a few years ago, has decided not to turn professional because of a back issue while Simon Carr will represent Ireland in UL next week having just returned from a hip injury. Wear and tear does seem to take its toll more on Irish players, especially with the brutal nature of life on the circuit.
And Claffey, who is now coaching young players, says there was simply no footsteps to follow, no well-worn path to tread.
‘When I was growing up, there were no role models. Nobody for me to look up to in
Ireland. My heroes were Kim Clijsters and Serena Willams.
‘Nobody had done it before me and if that is the case, you start to wonder if, nobody has done it before you, there is no path there for you to follow, so can you actually do this?’
Kevin Quinn has been CEO of Tennis Ireland for almost a year and the organisation is currently developing a strategic plan. The hope is that they will get a Futures, or even a Challenger event, back on these shores in the near future. In the likes of Dave O’Hare, who is vice-captain of the Davis Cup team and is coach of the US Open men’s doubles champions, they have a coach of some renown.
Like Niland, O’Hare went through the collegiate system in the US and he feels that can be part of the solution.
‘For me, it is about developing the domestic level, so we can maybe get 15 to 20 kids into the collegiate system in the States. It is about numbers,’ O’Hare suggests.
‘It is not going to happen today or tomorrow, it is probably a 10-year project to get an Irish player inside the top 100, but if the right systems and structures are in place, we can do it. I don’t think we are miles and miles away.’
Irish tennis doesn’t have to look far for evidence that it can be done. Sebastian Ofner, who will play for Austria next week, was bobbing inside and outside the top 200 for a few years. He found a bit of form and fitness and climbed from 197 to 37 within 12 months.
Maybe, some day, an Irish player will do something similar.
As a country, we’re more into team sports and they are better organised